Hop on the bus, Gus. Make a new plan, Stan…

Among the fifty ways to clear the air in Mexico City is this new regulation (The [Mexico City] News):

Mexico City launched an anti-traffic and emissions program Tuesday that requires students from primary through high school to take a bus to school.

Only students with disabilities, or those who can prove that they walk, bike, or take a form of public transport to school are exempt, the city program says. The program will go into effect at the start of the next school year.

Since this is a pragmatic way of handling a twice daily traffic problem (actually three times a day, given that schools run in two shifts) coming from a PRD administration, you can almost guarantee that PAN is already looking for some parent somewhere to file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission about … oh… anything.  And, Televisa will be running a lot of exclusives on the dangers of school buses.

When the Federal District replaced the little Rutas running up and down Insurgentes with the Metrobus  — running on dedicated inside lanes, and with stations every couple of blocks — PAN managed to find someone who claimed she was mugged walking the extra block to her house, and did its best to claim that her human rights were violated by not having a ruta that stopped exactly at her corner.  Televisa ran story after story about the crowded conditions on the Metrobus (it was free for the first month… and anyone who could conceivably change their commute to traveling Insurgentes did so, to save the two pesos in Metro fare) and blamed the bus for the idiot drivers who got themselves stuck in the dedicated lanes.

The school bus requirement includes prep schools and private academies (which aren’t always exclusively rich kids, though it will be good to get some of those “juniors” out of their Passants and Seats).  The thrice-daily traffic jams in front of private schools has been a problem for years — about five years ago a guy who couldn’t get down his street finally went Postal and ran over a couple of kids waiting for “Mami” to pick them up.  And… I’ve run into a lot of otherwise normal Chilangos who grew up never having been on public transit, and not knowing how to behave — so consider the school buses a civics lesson (and a sneaky way of breaking the over-dependence so many Mexicans develop on their mothers… mamites — “mommy-ism” … is probably a more serious public health problem than we like to admit).